Misophonia
By Dana Vowinckel. Translated by Adrian Nathan West (HarperVia)

Misophonia is a disorder characterized by a strong emotional response to certain sounds, such as a clap of thunder, a gunshot or the shrill and incessant ringing of an alarm. In this new novel that shares a name with the disorder, the strong reaction is to the noise made by an elderly Jewish couple eating their food.

The revulsion is experienced by Margarita Fuchs, the 15-year-old granddaughter of Dan and Selma Markovitz. Margarita lives in Germany with her father, Avi, a cantor at a Berlin synagogue, and is visiting her maternal grandparents in Chicago during her summer break. Their chewing isn’t the only thing that disgusts her.

Margarita is disgusted by her father, who she believes dumped her at her grandparents’ home near the University of Chicago, where her grandfather once had a distinguished career as a linguist. She is also repulsed by her estranged mother, Marsha, also a linguist, who now lives in Israel. Marsha abandoned Avi and their daughter when Margarita was just an infant and now insists on developing a relationship with the teen, forcing Margarita to visit her in Israel.

Most of all, Margarita is disgusted at herself. Precocious in some ways, immature in others, Margarita is at the cusp of adulthood, and she is, at once, repelled, fascinated and confounded by her budding sexuality.

The coming-of-age story is a debut from 20-something Vowinckel, who hails from a self-described American-Jewish-German family in Berlin and who first published the book in Germany in 2023.

The book toggles between the perspectives of Margarita and Avi, both of whom travel between Berlin, Chicago and different locales in Israel as they struggle with questions about their identities.

Among them, what does it mean to be a Jew in Germany several generations after the Shoah? Why would Avi, who was born in Israel to a Turkish Jewish father and a German Jewish mother, decide to make his home in a country that his own mother had fled?

Avi is compelled to face this question when he visits Yad Vashem in Jerusalem:

“The Polish and German memorials always expressed their outrage that even the assimilated Jews had been killed, but here, in Yad Vashem, all that mattered was that they had been people,” he thinks to himself about those in the country he now calls home. “The Germans used to think that the Jews who had eaten Leberkäse with cream sauce on Yom Kippur deserved less to die than the pious ones, probably they still thought so. The Germans thought the truly awful thing was that some of them had been murdered, just totally normal Germans who happened to have had a Jewish grandmother….”

Through the separate travels of this father and daughter, the author suggests, cogently, that misophonia is not just about the noises outside our head that make us anxious or unwell. It is also very much about the endless clanging and churning of thoughts inside our head—about family history, identity, loss and belonging—that keep us up at night.

Robert Nagler Miller writes frequently about the arts, literature and Jewish themes from his home near New York City.